“You know, I completely took my partner off of her psychiatric medication after a month on vitamin supplements. She’s doing fine now.”

I have a relative who did this with his second wife. He’s the sort of person that, when we meet for family dinners at restaurants, he pulls out this huge pill container and has to swallow about 20 different supplements before his meal.

He talked his second wife into flushing her anti-depressants down the toilet, and switching to all-natural supplements instead. She ended up tail-spinning back into a depressive cycle and eventually, for the sake of her health, she divorced him.

His first wife? Died of complications from diabetes. She was in and out of hospitals throughout her life, so I suspect she may have been more skeptical of his vitamin supplement peddling than his second wife would be. And because of that, I don’t know for sure that his mistrust of conventional medicine played any role in his first wife’s death. But the fact that I can’t rule it out entirely is disturbing enough.

The kicker is that this relative has no problem trusting in conventional medicine when he needs it. He recently had surgery to correct a hernia. The asshole in me wanted to ask why he didn’t just cure it with supplements.